The Roman roots of Venice
Every guidebook and history of Venice begins by assuring you that the city was founded in AD 421 by refugees fleeing to the 118 uninhabited islands set around a lagoon in the Adriatic Sea to escape the warlike ‘barbarians’ pouring into northern Italy – a bewildering array of tribal groups known to historians (but probably not to themselves) as Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Huns, Lombards, Saxons, Gepids, Bulgars, and Thuringians, all seeking new lands to settle in the dying days of the declining Roman Empire.
The idea that there was no pre-existing Roman settlement on the site of medieval Venice is hard to credit when you realise that the Italian peninsula was heavily populated under the Roman Empire, with scarcely a square metre of uninhabited land – marshes and islands were no barrier to settlement, as the landscapes of the Po Delta to the south testify, as do the nearby settlements at Grado and Aquileia.
Now the murky tidal waters of the Treporti channel, in the northern part of the Venetian lagoon, have yielded their secrets to a sonar study, revealing the presence of a Roman road and a possible harbour. In an article published on 22 July 2021 in the journal Scientific Reports, Fantina Madricardo and her colleagues at the Venetian Institute of Marine Science report on the results of a sonar survey that has detected a 1km length of road. Divers have subsequently photographed the remains, retrieved paving stones (basoli), and mapped what they interpret as part of a harbour wall. Amphorae were also retrieved, ranging in date from the 1st century BC to the 4th century AD.
History hidden in plain sight